Failure -Is That Still a Thing? Anonymous

I don’t believe in failure. I don’t believe that it is possible to mess something up so entirely that nothing good can come of it. If I make a mistake, I learn from it. If I'm not as good as I want to be at something, I work that much harder at it. Mistakes prompt lessons, and lessons lead to improvement. So in the end, how can failure even occur? It all depends on how you look at it, and what you choose to take away.

When I joined the cross country team my freshman year, I was not a runner, but I wanted to be. I saw how confident running had made my brother, I saw how close he and his teammates had grown each year, and I saw, most vividly, the giant hot fudge sundae waiting for me at the end of each race. I would undoubtedly become the mirror image of the women on the cover of Runner’s World Magazine. That is, after I ran off the calories.

I arrived the first day of practice with a severe lack of summer training and what quickly became clear as a misguided notion of reality. This became shockingly evident as I finished the first day’s work out (four miles through winding forest hills) right on the heels of the second-to-last girl. The final six of us had fallen so far behind that we had lost sight of our superiorly-speeded...